The Russian Revolution полностью

Similar processes also took place in industry and in the armed forces. The Bolsheviks initially turned over the running of industrial plants to Factory Committees, whose workers and lower clerical personnel were under the influence of syndicalism. These committees removed the owners and directors and took over the management. But they also used the opportunity to appropriate the assets of the plants, distributing among themselves the profits as well as matériel and equipment. According to one contemporary, in practice “worker management” reduced itself to the “division of the proceeds of a given industrial enterprise among its workers.”¹³ Before they headed for home, front-line soldiers broke into arsenals and storehouses, taking whatever they could carry: the rest they sold to local civilians. A Bolshevik newspaper provided a description of this kind of military duvan. According to its reporter, a discussion of the Soldiers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet on February 1, 1918 (NS), revealed that in many units troops demanded the contents of regimental depots: it was common for them to take home the uniforms and weapons obtained in this manner.¹⁴

72. Iakov Sverdlov.

The notion of national or state property thus disappeared along with that of private property, and it did so with the encouragement of the new government. It was as if Lenin had studied the history of the peasant rebellion under Emelian Pugachev in the 1770s, who had succeeded in seizing vast areas of eastern Russia by appealing to the anarchist and anti-proprietary instincts of the peasantry. Pugachev had exhorted peasants to exterminate all landlords and to take their lands as well as Crown lands. He promised them no more taxes and military recruitment, and distributed among them the money and the grain taken from their owners. He further pledged to abolish the government and replace it with Cossack “liberties”—that is, communal anarchy. Pugachev might well have brought down the Russian state had he not been crushed by Catherine’s armies.¹⁵

In the winter of 1917–18, the population of what had been the Russian Empire divided among itself not only material goods. It also tore apart the Russian state, the product of 600 years of historical development: sovereignty itself became the object of duvan. By the spring of 1918, the largest state in the world fell apart into innumerable overlapping entities, large and small, each claiming authority over its territory, none linked with the others by institutional ties or even a sense of common destiny. In a few months, Russia reverted politically to the early Middle Ages when she had been a collection of self-governing principalities.

The first to separate themselves were the non-Russian peoples of the borderlands. After the Bolshevik coup, one ethnic minority after another declared independence from Russia, partly to realize its national aspirations, partly to escape Bolshevism and the looming civil war. For justification they could refer to the “Declaration of the Rights of the Nations of Russia,” which the Bolsheviks had issued on November 2, 1917, over the signatures of Lenin and Stalin. Made public without prior approval of any Soviet institution, it granted the peoples of Russia “free self-determination, including the right of separation and the formation of an independent state.” Finland was the first to declare herself independent (December 6, 1917, NS); she was followed by Lithuania (December 11), Latvia (January 12, 1918), the Ukraine (January 22), Estonia (February 24), Transcaucasia (April 22), and Poland (November 3) (all dates are new style). These separations reduced the Communist domain to territories inhabited by Great Russians—that is, to the Russia of the mid-seventeenth century.

The process of dismemberment was not confined to the borderlands: centrifugal forces emerged also within Great Russia, as province after province went its own way, claiming independence from central authority. This process was facilitated by the official slogan “All Power to the Soviets,” which allowed regional soviets at different levels—region (oblast’), province (guberniia), district (uezd), and even volost’ and selo—to claim sovereignty. The result was chaos:

There were city soviets, village soviets, selo soviets, and suburban soviets. These soviets acknowledged no one but themselves, and if they did acknowledge, it was only “up to the point” that happened to have been advantageous to them. Every soviet lived and struggled as the immediate surrounding conditions dictated, and as it could and wanted to. They had no, or virtually no … bureaucratic soviet structures.¹⁶